After the big freeze that happened across Texas in February that crippled the electrical grid Texas's Grid operators were put on the hot seat to get this issue fixed. While rolling power outages might be common or at least heard of in other states in Texas that has not been a thing since I have been alive. My mouth dropped open today when I saw the emergency press release today. ERCOT is the Electric Reliability Council of Texas and they run Texas's electrical grid. Texas is not like other states who are interconnected due to not wanting to have to be federally regulated and for the most part it has worked well until the Feburary freeze. 

As someone who works in a Texas Congressional Office this week might be a little rougher than I had hoped. The press release though points out something that I think everyone deserves an answer to. Why are all of these utilities taking power generational offline at or around the same time. The people of the Great State of Texas with 100-degree heat cannot just stop using AC. I get that some generation can and will almost always be offline for routine maintenance I mean after all its better to temporarily put it offline before you run the plants into the ground and they cannot be used. 

ERCOT itself said that this is unusual and I am hopefully hoping that they fine the crap out of operators who took their plants offline for maintenance that did not need it. There is just no way that they all needed to go offline like this. Weather in the state has not been that bad that would have prevented mainteinece earlier or later on so this truly makes no sense to me. Putting peoples lives in danger because of utilities being idiots is something that ERCOT cannot allow to happen and they must take a stand against this.